We've already compiled a list of all of the picks for the full festival that you absolutely shouldn't miss, but, below, we've rounded up the movies for the week that our critics think are worth watching, like Daisy Asquith's Queerama, Annemarie Jacir's Wajib, Stephen Maing's Crime + Punishment, and Kim Yang-hee's The Poet and the Boy. Follow the links below for showtimes, trailers, and ticket links, and check out our SIFF Guide for the full schedule, including Sorry to Bother You, L’Inferno with a live score by My Goodness, and a screening of the SeriesFest award winners.
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TUESDAY ONLYFalling
While drying out in the Ukrainian countryside, an erstwhile musician has a chance encounter with a illusion-free woman. A very promising debut for director Marina Stepanska, where the emotional surges and deeply felt performances handily overcome the increasing predictability of the plot. (Somewhere, Anton Chekhov’s ears must be burning.) What lingers, ultimately, are the early scenes between the leads, which beautifully capture the thunderous, helpless rush of an instant connection. Every sideways glance crackles with potential energy. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Oslo Diaries
It’s reasonable to ask why we need a documentary that chronicles a quarter-century-old peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that has yet to achieve its aims. The answer is simple: In pretty much all realms, we need to relearn the kind of brave and fragile process that was at the heart of the 1993 Olso Peace Accords. “Part of what happens in negotiations,” says an American diplomat present for Oslo’s enemy-versus-enemy conversations, “is the humanization of the other side.” We are in an era in which new mediums, old demagogic tricks, and urgent problems have all conspired to produce a limitless supply of absolutist, non-negotiable answers from pretty much everyone to pretty much everything. Watch and learn how to compromise for the greater good, and how easy it is for nativists and nationalists to pounce on peaceful compromise at its most vulnerable moment. (ELI SANDERS)
Lincoln Square Cinemas
Three Peaks
I confess I have a movie crush on Bérénice Bejo. Maybe it’s because she has come to SIFF four times, maybe it is because she is married to Michel Hazanavicius, maybe it’s because she was nominated for an Oscar (for The Artist), or maybe it is because she served me bread and cheese at her flat in Paris. Or maybe it is because I know she is not really French but was born in Buenos Aires and has just completed a new movie by one of my favorite directors, Pablo Trapero. In any case, she stars as Lea in this ominous thriller, a woman with a possessive 8-year-old son Tristan and a Viking-like boyfriend named Aaron. They take a vacation high up in the mountains. Physical and psychological landscapes are at the center of the film as Aaron takes Tristan on a mountain hike, and the boy’s rebellion against his temporary father escalates to dangerous heights. (CARL SPENCE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Ellen
In the bright lexicon of narrative, there’s no grimmer framework than that of a woman forced by circumstance to murder her own meth-addicted son. And that’s just the dusk on the fringes of the darkness this true story explores. Though the filial violence is what made Ellen Pakkies’s nightmarish situation into tabloid fodder in her native South Africa, the film is more interested in the economic conditions that led her son to “tik,” and the hellish inequities that persist within the criminal justice system. Not an easy film to watch, or to forget. (SEAN NELSON)
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Pacific Place
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
Sober and somber like its subject, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda portrays the keyboardist for Yellow Magic Orchestra (Japan’s Kraftwerk) and renowned film composer’s solitary, workaholic life following his throat-cancer diagnosis and the Fukushima earthquake/tsunami. The latter disaster catalyzed Sakamoto into activism, and one of Coda’s most interesting bits shows him playing a water-damaged piano. “Pianos don’t go out of tune,” he says. “Matter is struggling to return to a natural state. The tsunami piano returned to nature actually sounds good to me now.” Such philosophical insights as well as footage of Sakamoto’s far-flung field-recording trips, his love for Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, and him scoring films for impulsive directors reveal an ingenious musician still questing for new ideas. (DAVE SEGAL)
AMC Pacific Place & SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Most Dangerous Year
Apparently, 2016 was the most dangerous year for trans people. After the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in the summer of 2015, the antigay agenda had lost, but their energy didn’t just disappear. Instead, director Vlada Knowlton’s documentary posits that antigay activists focused on a different target: anti-trans bathroom bills. The film features multiple Washingtonian families with young trans children affected by the flood of bathroom bills that appeared in 2016. The portraits are a humanizing and well-researched look at an issue that seems mind-blowingly simple to many progressives: Why can’t people pee where they want to pee? (CHASE BURNS)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & Shoreline Community College
Angels Wear White
Remarkable youth performances anchor Vivian Qu’s rigorous procedural about the adults who exploit children—and the systemic misogyny that protects them. Mia, who is undocumented, is working at a seaside motel when a prominent citizen checks in with two underage girls. When their parents find out, the police launch an investigation, but at every turn, women take the blame for the actions of men. Even Wen’s mother holds the 12-year-old responsible, but these girls—like this film—are tougher than they look. (KATHY FENNESSY)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Happy Birthday
After encountering each other on opposite sides of a violent protest, a policeman and his rebellious daughter reach the Final Straw. When the rest of the family confines the two to their country house, they must decide if neutral ground still exists. The generational squabbles may feel cookie cutter at first—these kids and their phones!—but there’s some real heat to their throw downs, as well as more than a few instances where neither viewpoint seems to be all that correct. The story is intriguingly thorny, with lead performances that deepen as the gulf between the characters grows wider. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Prospect
Is this the first major work of Northwest science fiction? Indeed, it imagines a moon that is like the evergreen forests that surround Seattle. The whole planet is green—gothic green. And the light on this strange moon is sharply slanted like Northwest light. The superb film is about prospectors (a father and daughter) looking for a root-made gem that will make them rich. The daughter, however, is keen to get off the planet because the line to it is about to be shut down. But her father is money-mad. If he does not make it here, he will never make it anywhere in the galaxy. Translucent insects float through the air. There are other money-mad prospectors in the endless forest. You do not leave this planet without paying a big price. Money is the root of all evil. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
Shoreline Community College
This Is Home
As American missiles fell near Damascus in mid-April, you may have seen a number begin to circulate in your social-media feeds: 11. That’s the total number of Syrian refugees the United States has accepted so far in 2018, a minuscule amount compared to the same period two years ago. Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are a prominent undercurrent in This Is Home, a documentary following several Syrian refugees settling in Baltimore. But the film’s central conflict is even more systemic. It brings viewers along for the profoundly disorienting experiences—both big and small—that come with fleeing to a new country: struggling with the language, watching destruction in your home country on the evening news, realizing you’re on the wrong bus. It engenders both empathy for its subjects and anger at the system that gives them a brutally short eight months to become self-sufficient. And it quietly reveals how quick white Americans are to play the savior and how their good intentions can morph into condescension. This Is Home is a powerful story that turns away from familiar footage of migrants fleeing violence and toward the loneliness of what happens next. (HEIDI GROOVER)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Tigers Are Not Afraid
In drug-war-torn Mexico, Estrella is in a battle against circumstance and time. As she runs from the gang and cartel leader who murdered her mother, the dilemma already appears to have fully surfaced, but darker forces soon come into play. A thin but ominous stream of blood follows Estrella’s every turn, and her mother’s ghostly instructions mix with the rustling plastic that coats her corpse. Equally imaginative, humanizing, joyful, and tragic, this film is a dark fairy tale with a light that burns even more savagely than the darkness of its very real horrors. (SOPHIA STEPHENS)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Wajib
A father and son drive around hand-delivering wedding invitations all over Nazareth. Each location they visit is a little vignette into Christian Palestinian life. As they drive, they talk about their lives, probe their father-son issues, hint around their wants and frustrations, fight, reconcile, try to come to an understanding. The son lives abroad and is continually frustrated with the old-timey way people think and do things in his homeland. The father, living there day to day, sees the value in the old ways and is a realist about the compromises necessary to be a Palestinian living in Israel. Written and directed by Palestinian filmmaker and poet Annemarie Jacir, the father-son story is heartfelt and the acting is compelling. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
AMC Pacific Place & SIFF Cinema Uptown
Cuban Food Stories
Food is inextricably linked to culture, to tradition, and to memory. Unfortunately for filmmaker and Cuba native Asori Soto, he was robbed of those memories as a child, when the economic crisis forced bereft cooks to scrimp on ingredients. In Cuban Food Stories, he returns to reclaim the flavors of his homeland—but don’t expect familiar meals like pork, rice, and beans. Instead, you’ll be introduced to dishes that live not in cookbooks or on menus, but through oral tradition, some of them in locations so isolated they can be reached only by horseback or raft. Like ceviche so fresh, it’s prepared still on the fishing boat, or coconut meat scraped out of the shell and drizzled with honey and rum at a remote countryside stand. Soto is a loving documentarian, and his dedication to Cuba is palpable in every frame. (JULIANNE BELL)
Shoreline Community College
The Widowed Witch
This story of a woman besieged with misfortune includes a vein of magical realism. Er Hao has lost three husbands, leading people to believe she is cursed. She struggles to find a new place for herself. But when she starts using her powers to help people, she is labeled a witch with important gifts. Some see her as a person bringing healing and blessings, and others see her as putting dangerous curses on them. But every act has consequences, sometimes what seems like a positive outcome is actually harmful, and vice versa. The snowy, frozen landscape of rural China sets a bleak tone, but the movie has some delightful visual elements and an intriguing feminist story. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
Lincoln Square Cinemas
Nona
When a poor girl from Honduras meets Hecho—a charming, handsome stranger who offers to rescue her from the everyday violence of her homeland and take her to be with her mother in the United States—she thinks her prayers have been answered. And for a while, this seems to be true. But as they approach their destination, Hecho’s intentions for her are revealed, and her nightmare, she soon realizes, is just beginning. With Sulem Calderon, Jesy McKinney, and Kate Bosworth, Nona is a horror film disguised as a romance. (KATIE HERZOG)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Rust
It is known that teenagers do stupid things, but this Brazilian film reminds us that thoughtless actions can be irreversible and may even haunt kids, and their families, forever. A leaked sex tape, social-media bullying, and an irreversible act lead to tragedy that ripples through many lives. We first get a glimpse into the life of a popular high-school girl whose phone has fallen into the wrong hands, and then into that of a young man who has trouble making peace with himself and those around him. Both kids have secrets. Both have regrets. (KAIA CHESSEN)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & SIFF Cinema Uptown
Last Child
Fine acting and twisty plotting distinguish this slow-burn thriller. After one teenager dies saving another, the mourning parents are left to pick up the pieces. The father wants to establish a scholarship and the mother wants to have another child, but they’re mostly marinating in misery until Sungcheol takes Kihyun, the shifty kid Eunchan saved, under his wing. With one dead parent and another who couldn’t give a damn, the 17-year-old has to provide for himself, so Sungcheol gives him a job, but his charity takes a turn that none of them—the entire community included—could have anticipated. (KATHY FENNESSY)
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Shoreline Community College
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
After seven bandits invade her home, a widow hits the road with justice on her mind and five and three-quarters bodies in her wake. This astonishing neo-western begins with a sequence that will bring jaded grindhouse patrons to their feet, and then it blazes its own trail from there, incorporating some potent feminist themes along the way. Intoxicating viewing, really, with a director that knows when to pause for a languid long shot and when to slam forward into nastiness. Once heard, the soundtrack’s blending of traditional Indonesian folk songs and Ennio Morricone’s electric coyote yelps will never leave your head. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
AMC Pacific Place
Queerama
“Contrary to popular opinion, most homosexuals don’t look any different from anyone else.” Thus begins this hour-long montage of queer news, cinema, and culture over the past 100 years. Beginning with 1919’s Different from the Others and moving through newsreels about underground gay communities, queer liberation, the AIDS crisis, the fight for marriage equality, trans rights, and more, the archival footage spans the evolution of queerness as a perversion—something secret, taboo, criminal—to something as ordinary as Seattle rain. Set to music by John Grant and Hercules & Love Affair, the film isn’t narrated so much as it is sung. Catch it if you like extended music videos—if not, skip it and head to the gay bar instead. (KATIE HERZOG)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Waru
On first look, it might seem like this film is too depressing to watch. Its eight vignettes (all directed by Maori women) revolve around the death of a young child named Waru. Each character is either directly connected to the child (family member, teacher) or part of the indigenous community that is plagued by the problems that resulted in his death (poverty, substance abuse). Since each part has a different writer/director, there is a variation in the style and quality of the content. But overall, the women’s stories are affecting and really stay with you. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
SIFF Film Center
Leave No Trace
Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) has never made I film haven’t loved and has the distinction of being the only American filmmaker to have her work presented at this year’s Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival (and the only American woman filmmaker at Cannes, period). The film also has Seattle roots in the talented producer and co-screenwriter Anne Rosellini. Based on Peter Rock’s 2009 novel My Abandonment, Granik moves her filmmaking from the Ozarks to the Pacific Northwest, with a story about the growing chasm between a father/widower/veteran afflicted with PTSD who insists on living apart from the world and his teenage daughter who yearns to join it. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie are sublimely cast, creating nuanced and indelible characters that will leave you in suspense about how they can come to terms with the world without breaking each other’s hearts. (CARL SPENCE)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Pacific Place
Constructing Albert
After the famous sibling-run Spanish restaurant elBulli closed its doors in 2011, younger brother Albert Adrià went on a gastronomic tear, with a plan to open five very different restaurants around Barcelona at warp speed. The frenzied sequences of various opening nights make for fascinating pre-meal viewing, especially when raising the issue of whether the subject’s constant drive for invention stems from creativity—the chef himself compares it to a director making films in different genres—or something possibly less enviable. The hungry should be advised: Even at the height of the chaos, the food close-ups are practically obscene. (ANDREW WRIGHT)
Kirkland Performance Center & AMC Pacific Place
Being There
One of the most brilliant, turbulent, and frustrating actors of the 20th century, Peter Sellers, pretty much gave his goodbye to the world and fame with this 1979 film. It’s directed by the great Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude). It’s a masterpiece of cinema. And though the last scene in the movie refers to one of Jesus’s miracles, the core of its story owes everything to the life of Buddha. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Empty Hands
This martial-arts drama is told with heart and humor. It is about an entitled slacker who has a strained relationship with her karate coach dad. She blames him for her mom leaving, and she also has lingering resentment about being forced to learn karate as a child (she quit before getting her black belt). She is also mad about growing up in an apartment he made into a dojo, which, after his passing, she plans to convert into multiple living spaces and rake in the cash as a slumlord. Except her dad wills her only 49 percent of it—the other 51 percent is left to an ex-student who seems intent on keeping the dojo open. Their inevitable clash ends in a proposition that forces her to evaluate what’s really important: He’ll give her his share if she can make it through (not necessarily win) a legitimate martial-arts competition. (LEILANI POLK)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Green Days by the River
In 1950s Trinidad, Shell is a charismatic 15-year-old who has moved to a new rural community. It is a beautiful place, all shades of green with lovely meandering rivers. He faces the usual teenage dilemmas: which girl to like, what job to get, what he wants versus what his parents want for him. The culture of Trinidad is fascinating, with descendants of Africans and East Indians mixing it up together, and it all comes into play in the film when young people come together (speaking their lyrical English Creole). The story is centered on the characters; they exist only in this place, with little entering from the outside world—and the gorgeous soundtrack helps carry it all along. (GILLIAN ANDERSON)
SIFF Film Center
Hagazussa - A Heathen’s Curse
Slow, cruel, and ghoulishly beautiful, Hagazussa chronicles the deterioration of an outcast woman in 15th-century Austria. Shunned single mother Albrun, haunted by her own mother’s death from plague, lives in a mountain hut and farms goats. One day, she lets down her guard to a seemingly kind villager named Swinda, a mistake with catastrophic results. The story is not as dramatically satisfying as The Witch, a comparison that seems inevitable. But first-time director Lukas Feigelfeld’s concept is as scary as anything in the festival: religious persecution spurring its victims to ever-greater masochistic transgressions. (JOULE ZELMAN)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Naples in Veils
To the fortysomething Seattle housewives holding a glass of wine right now while reading this: This film is for you, and, yes, grab your Hitachi. When Adriana meets Andrea at an occult Neapolitan ceremony at her aunt’s house, it seems like lust at first sight—that is, until Andrea turns up eyeless and dead on Adriana’s autopsy table the next day. In an aggressively sensual mix of murder, sex, and mystery, this film is an enthralling story of violence that masks itself with the exquisite. Nipples—I mean, Naples—may be in veils, but the veils can always be torn off. (SOPHIA STEPHENS)
Kirkland Performance Center
On Chesil Beach
I have two words on why you should see this film: Saoirse Ronan. She is radiant; she is a chameleon-like actor. Maybe you forgot she was in Atonement, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Loving Vincent. She was even in Lady Bird?! Based on Ian McEwan’s novella and directed by Dominic Cooke, longtime artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, this is a film about British sex in the 1960s, just before the sexual revolution. On Chesil Beach is the story of Florence and Edward, young university graduates getting married without ever having slept in the same bed together. Billy Howle (Dunkirk) stars as the hapless husband-to-be. When they meet on their wedding bed, things do not go as planned and everything they’ve been keeping together emotionally for their entire lives unravels with devastating consequences. (CARL SPENCE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Virus Tropical
Richly detailed black-and-white animation brings Paola Gaviria’s graphic memoir to entertaining, if somewhat solipsistic, life. In 1976, Paola’s self-proclaimed psychic mother, who had her tubes tied, is shocked to find that she’s pregnant. “Must be a tropical virus,” quips her doctor. Santiago Caicedo’s adaptation captures the ups and downs of Paola’s childhood: adventures with Catholicism, sweet and sour times with her sisters, and a transformational move from Ecuador to Colombia where she finds her calling as an artist. It’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl by way of Persepolis set to a Latin American beat. (KATHY FENNESSY)
Shoreline Community College
★
Johann Lurf has made a film that can be watched only while one is stoned. It’s a 99-minute journey through 110 years of starry skies in cinema. We see shot after shot after shot of stars and more stars. The film will not easily grip a mind that is sober, and will certainly lose one that is drunk. But a mind that is totally baked will be filled with that feeling Walt Whitman once described as the awe of the all. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Film Center
Crime + Punishment
Are you aware of the number of people in prison for crimes they did not commit, or else crimes that are so minor that white people would not even be arrested for them? Would you be shocked to learn that all of them are people of color? Would you be shocked to learn that the New York City Police Department continued to demand that officers arrest a certain number of people per day, even when the officers had found no criminals, and even after the courts specifically prohibited NYPD from having these quotas? This documentary tells the stories of such “criminals,” and also the good officers trying to fight against the quotas scandal. Their stories are intercut with gorgeous bird’s-eye views of the city’s exteriors in various seasons. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Breath
An uncommonly strong coming-of-age story about two young best friends in early 1970s Australia who, under the tutelage of an older adept, become immersed in the itinerant, vaguely mystical, entirely hardcore culture of surfing (before it was a lifestyle available to weekend warriors). The film is based on a best-selling Australian book, and you can easily see why the story and characters would generate such broad appeal. It’s not quite as brainy as William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, but not quite as cartoony as Point Break. And the surfing bits are killer. (SEAN NELSON)
Kirkland Performance Center
The Bottomless Bag
Rashomon, in which multiple people describe the same violent crime, has become the archetypal simile for people trying to describe the problems of subjective perception in establishing truth. This Russian film adapts the same short story that inspired Kurosawa’s classic, “In a Grove” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, but to a very different end. The variations in the retelling of the murder story become the keys to discerning the different characters’ selves and souls. The relativity of truth and the elasticity of time (especially in pre-Soviet Russia) are understood. It’s everything else that tells the real story. I have no idea if or how this connects to the nature of “the Russians” as we conspicuously fail to understand them today, but I do know the black-and-white cinematography is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and relentlessly allusive (Chekhov, Ophuls, Tarkovsky, and Kurosawa are in the mix), which makes the world feel both bigger and smaller, which is one of cinema’s best tricks. (SEAN NELSON)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Crime of Monsieur Lange
The 1930s were good to French director Jean Renoir. In that decade, which was between the world-historical stock-market crash and the war that would break Europe’s back, Renoir directed two classics of cinema: The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. The year before the former was completed, 1936, Renoir directed a very lovely comedy about Parisian pulp writers, a capitalist publisher (and sex predator), and a socialist project (a cooperative of pulp writers) that seemed promising. The photography in The Crime of Monsieur Lange is often mesmerizing, and when Renoir’s characters walk down a street, or into a room, or up a staircase, they move with the lightness and sway of dancers. (CHARLES MUDEDE)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Last Suit
An extremely handsome and well-dressed Holocaust survivor from Argentina embarks on what feels like a final adventure to Poland to fulfill a promise he made during the Shoah. Though he’s charming and sympathetic, our hero is also a stubborn old man who has deeply disappointed all he’s sired. The quality and variety of the silk cravats in this film is enough to recommend it. But powerfully good acting and the heart-melting story of a survivor reckoning with an incomprehensibly painful past makes the film a must-see. (RICH SMITH)
Kirkland Performance Center
Number One
Emmanuelle Devos plays Emmanuelle Blachey, a powerful woman in the corporate world who is recruited by a French matriarch to run for CEO of a state-owned energy company. Blachey, and the posse of women supporting her, are at the top of their fields, but that doesn’t matter to the men around them—be it fathers, husbands, or colleagues—who treat women as alternately something to look at, something to conquer, or something to use. A film with enough deceit and intrigue to qualify as a light thriller, its essentially feminist message is not lost in the drama—it’s only made stronger. (KATIE HERZOG)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Poet and the Boy
It’s a tale as old as time: He is a sensitive poet with a low sperm count, and she is a horny debtor who wants a child. Plans to start a family break down when he falls for a hot teen boy who works at a nearby doughnut shop. Some beauty gets lost in translation here, but otherwise the film is aesthetically gorgeous without being cloying, the story is brutal without being melodramatic, and the script is surprisingly full of great lowbrow jokes. Best of all, the movie accurately portrays the process of poem-making: lots of scenes of the poet taking long walks and scraping the world for language, very few of him sitting down in a beam of light and taking dictation from the muse. (RICH SMITH)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
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